


'Till Our Wide Eyes Burn Blind

by maplemood



Category: Daredevil (TV), Jessica Jones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Families of Choice, Female Friendship, Flashbacks, Gen, Hope Shlottman Lives, Hopeful Ending, Investigations, Male-Female Friendship, Mentions of a Suicide Attempt, Past Abortion, Past Rape/Non-con, Platonic Bed Sharing, Pregnancy, Private Investigators, Recovery, References to Depression, Sharing a Bed, Unconventional Families, Unplanned Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-10
Updated: 2017-08-10
Packaged: 2018-12-13 19:13:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 7
Words: 17,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11766519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maplemood/pseuds/maplemood
Summary: Jessica’s hand curls into a fist. “It wasn’t my fault,” she says, very low and very, very hard. “You blame it on me and I swear to God—"“My brother thinks I’m dead. My aunt’s paying me a couple hundred bucks a month to keep it that way.”Jessica’s fist uncurls. Her eyes stay hard.Hope’s almost enjoying this, spewing all the boiling bitter ugliness no amount of therapy, meds, or schnapps can fix, but her next words make her want to spit.“I’m your problem now.”





	1. we'll be looking for sunlight or the headlights

**Author's Note:**

> Whew! This is the longest and most difficult (in terms of getting the darn thing _done_ ) fic I've written yet. In some ways, it's also the darkest. That being said, I love it enormously and hope you enjoy it, too. 
> 
> A note on spelling: I've seen both "Kilgrave" and "Killgrave". Though the show spells it with one L, the AO3 tags and, as far as I know, the comics, don't, so to keep things simple I stuck with two L's. 
> 
> Gobs and gobs of thanks go the the Defenders Big Bang deadlines for forcing me to finish on time (or at all). Also, check out [angelfirevt's](https://angelfirevt.tumblr.com/) fantastic artwork for chapters 1 & 3 [here](https://angelfirevt.tumblr.com/post/164024254818/art-made-for-maplemoods-awesome-story-in-the)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Left alone, almost broke, and cut off from the rest of her family in New York, Hope has just one person left to turn to.

So. This is how it starts.

Hope is two days out of the hospital psych ward and two minutes out of Mei’s apartment—the apartment that used to be hers, too, but isn’t now and never will be again. She has a plastic Target bag full of crap that Mei never got around to throwing out (her NYU sweatshirt, a pair of panties, a snow globe), a wallet full of however much Aunt Kathy is paying her to be a good little dead girl and never, ever contact Owen, and a gut full of really bad butterscotch schnapps. She’s at Jessica levels of intoxication (functioning, but just barely) when, head thrown back, she spots a man on the apartment roof.

A man in red.

At least she thinks it’s red.

Hope is about fifty percent sure that’s he’s in red, some shade of red, maybe maroon. That’s about as sure as she is of anything these days. She doesn’t blame seeing him on the schnapps; she and Mei were sort of Daredevil junkies, reading up on all the reports, buying any tabloid that claimed to have exclusive photos.

She liked his jaw. Mei liked the way victims described his voice—rusty, growling, like the voice of the devil himself.

(Of course. He’s Dare _devil_ ; what else are you supposed to think his voice sounds like? That’s what people want to hear.

Definitely what Mei wanted to hear.)

So, yeah, Hope is pretty drunk, but she’s been seeing a potential Daredevil in every tall, built guy with a good jawline for a while now. The schnapps, though, is definitely to blame for what she does next.

“Hey!” Hope yells, her voice weak and a little warbling; she’s always been a happy drunk.

He’s too far up to really tell, but she swears—swears—his head turns. Just a fraction.

“Hey!” Hope tries again. “Hey Daredevil!”

More than a fraction? She feels her face split into a big, overripe grin.

“This isn’t Hell’s Kitchen,” she calls up to him. “Didn’t you notice?”

She actually cocks her ear, waiting for an answer, but nothing comes and when she looks up again the man in red is gone. Hiding in the shadows or jumping between rooftops? Hope’s not sure, but the idea of either makes her stupidly happy, happier than she’s been in a long time. Happier than she’s been in forever.

“I love you,” she sing-songs. And then—wow, the schnapps is not being kind to her—lifts the hem of her sweatshirt up, almost over her head.

“I love you _this_ much,” she says, then stumbles around because she hears a honk and of course the cab Mei insisted she call and Hope insisted she wait outside for is here, just in time to catch her yelling at a building with her tits out.

She won’t remember what she and Mei said to each other, or the stiff hug she got before she left, or how she paid the driver, but she’ll remember the man on the roof.

She’ll remember him forever.

+

Hope gets to know her toilet really well—intimately, even—the next morning. Once her stomach’s mostly emptied she climbs into the tub to hose off. Then back into bed, still dripping.

She can’t stay at the Holiday Inn forever. The housekeepers all remember her face from the news ( _Double Homicide in Hell’s Kitchen! Couple’s 20-year-old Daughter Implicated!_ ) and refuse to set foot in her room, or even leave fresh towels by the door. But apart from that, Hope’s income, such as it is, is stretching thin. Transparent. Budgeting isn’t her strong suit; she used to joke with Mei that the reason she bought nothing was because, given the chance, she’d buy anything. Scented tampons? _Sure!_ A designer purse? _Why not?_ A life-size cardboard cut-out of Daredevil? _This’ll look great in my bedroom!_

Living in New York City isn’t cheap, though, and Hope’s not stupid. When Mei broke out the schnapps she thought, for a minute, that they might work something out; now that she’s hungover she sees that it was a ploy to block conversation. A pretty good one, too. Someone else already moved in, anyway. Mei kept mentioning that— _My roommate’s coming back. He’ll be here soon_ —like she expected Hope to pull a gun out of her purse and spray her full of bullet holes.

Nope. That arrangement (that friendship) is over.

She should have milked Aunt Kathy for more money.

Better yet, she should get a job.

That makes Hope laugh, which triggers her gag reflex, which sends her staggering back to the toilet. Of course she should get a job—she’s never needed one more—but come on. She’s the girl who shot both her parents in the head and blamed it on a man in a purple suit. She’s the definition of unhireable.

There must be plenty of schnapps left in her system, since the memory of Mom’s face the second before the shot doesn’t hurt nearly as much as it should. Hope still cries, though. Deep, wrenching sobs from the pit of her gut that don’t mix well with vomit.

 _Cheer up_ , she thinks to herself. _Maybe the man in red’s looking for a sidekick_. Half-spiteful, half-hopeful.

She cleans up again, gets back in bed. She thinks about Daredevil on the rooftop. It had to be him. Even drunk, she wouldn’t flash anyone else.

When she falls asleep, though, she doesn’t dream about Daredevil. She dreams she’s back in prison, handcuffed to the table.

_“I want to talk to Jessica.”_

_Hogarth’s there, files and coffee and that cap of perfect dark hair, as pissed off as she ever was. And she’s going on and on, about impossible situations, real life isn’t about happy endings, take what you have and fight like hell for it. But Hope has nothing. You can’t fight for nothing._

_Well. She has one thing. One person._

_“I want to talk to Jessica.”_

+

The sign’s new. Expensive, too. Hope traces a finger over the ribbed glass and gold lettering before knocking. _Alias Investigations_. It looks sturdy and professional; maybe Jessica’s finally started charging what she’s worth.

If she has, Hope won’t waste too much time feeling guilty over what she’s about to do.

When she does knock, a shadow bumps behind the glass, and something heavy-sounding slides to the floor with a crash.

“Shit!” Jessica sounds barely awake. “It’s open! _Shit_.”

Hope almost turns away when she hears her voice. This’ll be the sleaziest thing she’s ever tried--on Jessica, of all people. Jessica, who’s a drunk and a mess and the biggest bitch you’re likely to meet in New York City, who goes back on her own word all the time, but only because she knows that half of what she says is bullshit.

Who hasn’t seen her since the ambulance hauled Hope away, choking on her own blood, from Niku and the broken glass and the people, on their feet again but still choking. Crying. Cursing. Jessica, who’s down for prison visits but apparently can’t stand to drop by a psych ward—

Jessica, who fought for Hope with everything she had. _Everything_.

Another crash.

“Hey! I said it’s open.”

What a way to repay her. Hope squares her shoulders (her talks with Jessica always end up turning into battles) and pushes the door open.

“I need a job.”

Jessica clambers over the shreds of an IKEA box, somehow unsurprised but glaring. “Jesus, Hope.”

During visiting hours at the prison she said that so often that it started to run together, like a name. _Jesushope_! It makes Hope grit her teeth, makes her want to snap something back— _Jesus fuck, Jessica_!—because she’s not some idiot teenager. She never _was_ , even when she was still a teenager. And no matter how much she sounds like it, Jessica is not her sister, or her mom.

 _No battles_ , Hope thinks as Jessica’s eyes cut over her T-shirt, rusty under the armpits, and the tangles straggling out of her ponytail. Then down to her battered purse and stained, thrift-shop suitcase. _Not this time, please_. She doesn’t have the energy or the money.

“Jesus.” Jessica’s not one to worry about a shrinking vocabulary. “You ever heard of a laundromat?”

“Sure,” says Hope. “There’re not uncommon in the wilds of Omaha.”

She’s hoping for a smile. A grudging twitch of the lips, at least. Jessica just snorts.

“I haven’t had time,” Hope admits.

“Yeah? Looks like you’ve got nothing but time.”

 _Keep to the course. Don’t let her sidetrack you_. “That’s the problem.” Her voice sounds flat and false. Hope swallows and tries again. “I need work.”

Something twitches across Jessica’s face, but it isn’t a smile. “Booze costs money.”

Hope flinches. She showered before she came here. Twice.

“So I haven’t been doing well,” she almost snaps, not knowing quite why, why can she and Jessica never have a conversation that doesn’t involve snarls and twisted lips. “How am I supposed to be doing? After what he did to me—what did you _expect_?”

“I expected you to do better than me. That’s not asking for a whole hell of a lot, Hope.”

The purse straps dig into her shoulder. “Okay. Help me.”

Jessica doesn’t answer.

“Help me,” Hope repeats, really snapping now. “Killgrave never would have found me if he hadn’t found you before. I’d still have a family if you’d killed him the first time.”

 _Christ_. She doesn’t need to go this low.

She wants to.

Jessica’s hand curls into a fist. “It wasn’t my fault,” she says, very low and very, very hard. “You blame it on me and I swear to God—“

“My brother thinks I’m dead. My aunt’s paying me a couple hundred bucks a month to keep it that way.”

Jessica’s fist uncurls. Her eyes stay hard.

Hope’s almost enjoying this, spewing all the boiling bitter ugliness no amount of therapy, meds, or schnapps can fix, but her next words make her want to spit.

“I’m your problem now.”

As she waits for Jessica to punch a hole in the wall or toss her through the new door, shame works its way back through her. Hope wilts. She sees every dent and chip in the flimsy, paper-plate apartment walls. Jessica’s not loaded. Jessica doesn’t have an aunt paying her to sit on her ass. Hope can’t believe herself.

She’ll hide away in another hotel room, lie down in the bathtub, under a warm shower, and forget all of this, and never get up. Even then, though, she’d wait for Jessica to break down the door, lift her up and carry her away. Hope knows better. But she’s still waiting for someone to save her.

Jessica steps back. Rakes her hands through her hair, sighing like the world’s breaking across her shoulders and she’s none too happy about it.

“Can you file?”

Hope nods.

“Indexing?” Jessica pushes on. “Alphabetizing shit? You want to do that?”

“Yeah,” says Hope. “Of course.”

She tries to sound overjoyed, like that’ll make up for blackmail. It doesn’t. It sounds fake, faded and boxed-up. Jessica sneers.

 “You’ll have to sleep on the couch.”

“It’s fine.” Really, it is. She’s so tired of being alone. “Thank you.”

Jessica shrugs. Her eyes still haven’t quite softened. “It wasn’t my fault,” she repeats, and there’s something so desperate about the way she says it that Hope wants to cry. She knows how it feels. Why did she have to say that? What’s _wrong_ with her?

“I’m sorry.” It’s not enough.

Jessica turns and heads for the kitchen. After a minute Hope follows, picking her way over the broken-down furniture and torn boxes. IKEA. It looks like Jessica’s been trying to assemble some new shelves. In the kitchen she roots through her cupboards while Hope, hands shaking just a little parks the suitcase and sets her purse on the table.

“You like peanut butter?”

It isn’t really a question. “Sure.”

“There’s bread in the fridge.”

Hope finds a squashed loaf of Wonder Bread that Jessica grabs before she can offer to make the sandwich herself. Jessica slaps together three—one for her, two for Hope.

“I have a client coming in at twelve.” Her glare is identical to the one Hope got every Christmas, when her mom insisted on everyone “at least trying” a piece of fruitcake. Owen and Hope would choke down the thinnest slices they could possibly cut, rolling their eyes at each other and certain that the only reason this recipe was a “family secret” was because it was too disgusting for any other family to put up with. “Start eating.”

The sandwiches taste infinitely better than fruitcake, but Hope can’t finish hers. Jessica takes a few bites before abandoning her sandwich on the counter, too. They stare at each other for a second, bread and peanut butter clogging their throats like paste. Then Jessica shrugs and gets down a bottle of Jack Daniels and two chipped shot glasses.

“Don’t try bullshitting me again.”

The whiskey tastes even worse than the schnapps. It burns down Hope’s throat and up her nose, so sharp that she coughs and splutters and almost misses what Jessica says next. Which is probably why Jessica poured her a double shot in the first place.

“I thought we were beyond that.”


	2. 'till our wide eyes burn blind

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hope and Jessica get a late night visitor.

Jessica’s couch is actually a prison-orange futon. Hope sits on it, sorting through boxes of old files, while the twelve o’clock client bitches about her son, whose name is Taylor and won’t answer his phone, except he does, sometimes, and when he does he sounds “cagey” and “hopped up on something”, and his roommate isn’t talking, and with all the wild stuff going on in New York lately—she didn’t even want him to come here for school, they’re plenty of great colleges in Virginia but now that he’s here she wouldn’t be surprised if it had something to do with those things that just dropped out of the sky—people keep saying they’re gone for good, but nothing’s gone for good is it, they could pop back out any minute, and what did the news call them again, Chi-somethings…

Jessica isn’t polite, exactly, but she listens until she has all the information she needs. Name, photo, apartment address, phone number. Then the client tries to haggle down the billing rate. Hope almost feels sorry for her.

She licks her thumb and opens the next box. Jessica kept these pretty well organized on her own. There’s not much left to do.

Once the client’s out the door Jessica gets to work. Grabs her phone, hustles into her jacket, and glances over at the couch. She checks herself like she forgot all about Hope.

“See anything you like?”

Hope holds up yet another photo of yet another couple having what she can only pray is just intense backseat sex. “I’m not sure. How’s the Tuesday Special?”

Jessica’s lips twitch. She’s at least pretending to forget what happened earlier. That, ironically, only makes Hope feels worse. “I’m going to check up on this guy’s roommate. You figure the shelves out.”

“When’re you going to be back?”

It just slips out. Automatic.

Jessica yanks open the door. “Late.”

Once it slams behind her Hope gets up to stretch the kinks out of her back. She eyes the wobbling stack of shelves still piled in the corner. (“Should’ve never let Trish talk me into buying these.)

“Hey!”

Hope opens the door. “Yeah?”

Jessica’s waiting for the elevator. “If you need anything, call Trish. Her number’s on the fridge.”

That’s not happening. Ever. “Okay.”

“Don’t be shy.” The elevator dings open. “She loves getting her Mother Theresa on.”

Hope ducks back inside, remembering the last time she talked to Trish Walker, then trying to forget it. Fast. Remembering anything around that time feels like poking a raw wound.

_He made me do things. Things I’ve never done. That I never would do._

Never, until she did.

Hope pushes it all back, as far as it’ll go. Assembling the shelves helps. It’s an easy job once she finds the instructions balled up at the bottom of Jessica’s wastebasket. After that, she finishes one of her sandwiches and stares at the blue post-it stuck on the fridge. Jessica’s scrawled the number down so messily that Hope wonders if she wants her to read it wrong.

She still doesn’t plan to call it, but she enters it into her phone anyway. Hope clears up the kitchen and washes all five of Jessica’s dishes.

Then she goes back to the boxes.

The photos she’s looking for are stuffed into a manila envelope crumpled into the last box. She found them by accident, slipping them out and back in before either Jessica or her client could notice. Now that she’s alone, Hope spills them into her lap and looks them over one by one.  

What Mei wouldn’t give to see these.

She traces a finger over Daredevil’s jawline.

What the _National Inquirer_ wouldn’t give for these. Or the _New York Bulletin_. Hope fans the photos out like a deck of cards, wondering how much Jessica can afford to pay her. Wondering—for just a second—if she’ll one of these.

Stop it. Of course she will.

They’re all a little blurry, obviously taken from rooftops or fire escapes across the street, but still clearer and closer than anything the papers have put out so far. They also must be new; he’s wearing his red, horned costume in every single one.

(She and Mei used to get into arguments about which suit was better. Well, obviously the red one looked stronger, like actual armor, but which one was sexier? Mei thought black was his color. Hope preferred him in red. Neither of them would compromise.)

Sadly, Jessica hasn’t managed to catch him with his mask off. Hope wonders, though. Hell’s Kitchen is Daredevil’s turf. He’s never been spotted far from it.

Until two nights ago. And sure, she was wearing booze goggles, but…

Maybe someone sent him to watch over her. Someone who has leverage.

She wouldn’t put anything past Jessica.

+

Hope wakes—just barely—to Jessica cursing as she tries to plug in her charger. The lights are all off. She gropes under the futon for a good minute before finding her own phone.

Almost 1:00.

“You weren’t joking,” she croaks.

“Yeah, yeah.” Jessica sounds just as bad. “Go to sleep.”

The futon is softer than it looks. Hope rolls over just as Jessica hits the mattress; they sink into sleep within minutes of each other.

Only Hope dreams.

_This time it’s before prison, before she shot them, but only just before.  She knows what she’s about to do, but Jessica can’t know, not yet, so Hope puts her arms around her, hugs, whispers “You saved my life.”_

_She pulls away. She’s fought it for so long; now she only wants to turn back to her parents, to finish the job. Instead, Jessica’s glare roots her to the floor, and Hope realizes, in that split-second, unsurprised way you always do in dreams, that Jessica isn’t Jessica anymore._

_She knows that suit, all right. In the dream, Daredevil’s eyes glow red and glassy, blank and burning all at once. In the dream, he has her by the arm. In the dream, he twists it until it snaps._

_Hope screams. She’d down on her knees now, blood trickling from her mouth and arm and stinging in her eyes. She spits. A tooth—half a tooth—lands on the pavement._

_“Eyes to the ground,” he says. His voice is rusty, growling, and about the farthest thing from sexy Hope has ever heard. It roars inside her head until she cries, spitting up more blood, her nose pressed to the pavement. Something jagged scrapes her from the inside; she figures he broke a rib. Or two. Hope sobs, first from the pain, but then, under his eyes, huddled against the asphalt, she cries for something else._

 Shoot them in the head.

_The one thing he told her to do, the very last thing she was good for._

Shoot them. Both. In the head.

_The pull is gone. The desire too. Her parents are alive, and Hope has never felt emptier in her life._

_She cries until she feels his hand, first on her head, then slipping down to cup her chin. He’s not gentle. He grasps and yanks, forcing her to turn her face up._

_“They’re safe,” Daredevil says._

_She thanks him. Maybe. Hope’s lips move, but thanks to the blood and broken teeth she’s fuzzy on what comes out._

_Daredevil lets go of her chin and straightens. “I’ll be watching you,” he says. “If you think, for a minute, that I’ll let you hurt them—”_

_She can’t get up. She doesn’t think she’ll ever get up. Hope spits out another tooth._

_“One day this won’t be enough. One day you’ll come for them again.”_

_“And you’ll be waiting for me when I do.” Hope can’t feel her broken arm anymore. She braces her good one against the pavement and slowly—slowly—props herself up._

_“It’s okay,” she says. “I wouldn’t want anything else.”_

At 2:00 Hope gets up to pee. She presses a handful of toilet paper over her mouth so Jessica won’t hear her crying. The dream fades fast (by the time she’s done peeing she can’t remember what either of them said) but even though her ribs aren’t broken she still feels a pain, hot and molten, in the pit of her gut.

At 3:00 she wakes up to someone panting, wet and heavy, over her head. Hope opens one eye, praying that Jessica’s taken up jogging.

No such luck. The honest-to-God shadowy figure hunches over the futon—over _her_ —trying to say something. It coughs. Warm wetness splatters her collarbone.

She kicks first. Then yells.

“Jessica!”

Two crashes—one from right beside her, one from the bedroom as Jessica’s lamp hits the floor.

“Hope?”

It’s on the ground. Hope kicks again, just to be sure. She gets an awful, burbling groan and a throbbing toe for her trouble.

“ _Jessica_!”

The light flicks on.

The first thing Hope notices isn’t the man sprawled at her feet. It’s the blood. The spit-sticky spatter of it still warm on her skin, trickling under her shirt. The dribbles and drops on the floor. The smear under the open window. She remembers—there was more in the elevator, more during the abortion, more when she stabbed herself—but it’s still too much.

Too much.

“Jesus Christ.” Jessica kneels beside him and pries the mask off. She hands it to Hope without a word.

Well. It’s not Killgrave.

“Get the first aid kit under my bed.” She’s already busy loosening his armor.

Hope moves automatically. The mask gets dumped on the kitchen table; it glares at her, horns and all, while she fills a Tupperware bowl with hot water and grabs a mostly clean towel. It’s only when she’s back in the office, kneeling beside Jessica, that she realizes that this is beyond wet wipes and a couple packs of gauze.

“We need to call 911,” she says, her voice just this side of screechy— _not_ now, _Hope_.

Jessica ignores her.

“We need—”And then his arm shoots toward her like something out of _The Walking Dead_. He grabs Hope’s wrist, squeezing until the bones crunch together. She yelps.

 “No.” His voice is everything Mei hoped for. Almost like what she heard in the dream, but he wasn’t fighting for breath then. “You don’t.”

 _We do_ , Hope thinks, because what is Jessica now, a surgeon? But there’s a man holding on to her, a man who, hurt as he is, could hurt her even more.

“Okay,” she says, her voice wobbling. “We don’t.”

His grip doesn’t loosen. His eyes roll toward her voice, blank as the chips of glass in his mask, and Hope, too scared to be surprised, realizes he’s blind.

“We won’t.” Her wrist is starting to go numb; she pulls, her pulse throbbing against his fingers. “I have to help Jessica.”

He loosens up just enough for her to twist out. Coughs and brings up another spurt of blood. Hope turns to Jessica.

“Tell me what’s going on,” she says, not thinking about her parents, not thinking about the thing that slid out, bloody and in pieces, from between her legs. “Is he bleeding internally or what?”

 _Bleeding internally?_ So now she’s the surgeon?

“You tell me,” snaps Jessica, then slaps the man’s side. “Hey. Jackass.”

He turns until she lays a hand on his shoulder, pushing him back down. “Lie still. Are you bleeding internally or what?”

Daredevil shakes his head.

“No,” Hope quivers. “ _No_. You’re spitting up blood.”

He hisses through his teeth; maybe that’s supposed to be a laugh. “I bit my tongue.”

“Are you fucking serious?” Jessica smacks his side again, and the man flinches. “Jesus.” Her shoulders slump with relief while Hope takes a deep breath. Okay. Gashes and tears they can handle, right? It’s the stuff on the inside you have to worry about. The stuff that really hurts.

 “Do me a favor and buy a fucking mouth guard, okay?”

The man’s eyelids flicker. Hope can’t stop staring at them; she knows he can’t see her, but she feels his gaze just as heavy as anyone else’s. He lets out another hiss—yep, he’s trying to laugh.

“I’ll put it on my list.”

“The hell you will. Jackass,” Jessica repeats, before turning her glare on Hope. “He needs stitches. You’re going to help me.”

Helping Jessica doesn’t require much more than dragging the cracked lamp closer so that there’s enough light on the area. She doesn’t use gloves or sutures (“Too tricky.”). Instead, Jessica sends Hope to the bathroom for a box of dental floss, wipes down the first cut, and gets to work. Hope kneels next to the man’s head without saying a word.

It’s still tricky work. Jessica’s not gentle about it, either. The man doesn’t make a sound as she pulls the floss through, but Hope sees how he tenses up. Clenched jaw, stiff neck. Once she’s sure he won’t make another grab for her, she catches herself running her fingers through his hair, as if that’ll help. Probably feels like spiders scuttling across his skull.

His hair is dark brown. Maybe dark red; hard to tell when it’s already darkened with crusted blood and sweat. God. What would Mei say if she knew Hope got to run her fingers through Daredevil’s hair? Hope realizes, detached, almost floating, that this is the first time—not counting police officers and prison guards and hospital orderlies—she’s touched a man since Killgrave.

She snatches her fingers back.

She gets up once to refill the bowl with clean water and grab another towel. While the water runs she hears the man murmuring something to Jessica. His pitched so low that, even from a few feet away, she can’t make out the words. Hope wrings out the used, bloody towel and leaves it dripping in the sink.

“Maybe you didn’t notice,” Jessica is saying when she steps back through the doorway, “but my hands are occupied.”

“She shouldn’t—”

“She’s already involved.” Jessica reaches for the bowl, locking eyes with Hope. “I need you to make a call for him.”

Hope studies Daredevil’s face. It’s a stony sort of pissed. “Will I regret this later?”

“You wanted the job.”

“Touché.”

+

“Hello?”

She sounds almost exactly like Aunt Kathy. Hope drops down heavily onto the futon; the springs squeal and she barely notices.

“Hello?” she echoes. “Is this Karen?”

The voice on the other end sharpens. “Who is this?”

Hope swallows. _Stick to the script_. “I’m calling for a friend.”

Silence. She rushes on, “He needs you to tell Frank that something came up. He won’t be able to make it.”

“Shit,” says Karen, and Hope flinches. “God _damn_ it. Who’s he with?”

“I can’t—”

“ _Who’s he with_?”

Hope holds the phone out to Jessica, but the other woman just pushes it back toward her. “Karen knows me,” she says, sounding annoyed for having to admit it. “Go ahead.”

“Jessica,” Hope blurts, pressing the phone back to her ear. “He’s with Jessica.”

Now Karen’s voice sounds softer. The sharpness, though, doesn’t fade. “How bad is it?”

“Not too bad.” The lie slips out smooth as syrup. “He’ll be okay.”

“’Okay’,” Karen snorts. Hope hears sheets rustling, the slap of feet hitting the floor. “Whatever he says, huh? Tell him I’ll take care of Frank.”

“I will.”

“Oh, and while you’re at it? Tell him he’s an asshole.”

Hope giggles. Both Jessica and Daredevil swivel their heads to stare at her, like a pair of owls. She giggles again.

“Sorry,” Karen’s saying on the other end. “I’m just—tell him he’s an asshole.”

“Got it.”

She hears Karen yawn. “Have Jessica call me when she can.”

“Okay,” says Hope, wishing she could scrape together an excuse to keep talking for just a little longer, when two minutes ago she’d have given anything for this conversation to end.

 “Okay,” repeats Karen. “Take care of him.” There’s a pause; for a single stupid second Hope wonders if she wants to keep talking, too. But Karen only says, “Take care of yourself,” a little softer, then hangs up.

Hope presses _end call._ Jessica’s gone back to work, but Daredevil’s still watching her. For a second, his blank eyes remind of her of the burning glassy ones in her dream. She shivers.

“Karen says she’ll tell him,” she assures him. “Also that you’re an asshole.”

He smiles: slow, toothy, a little out of practice. “She’d know. She’s had a lot of experience with assholes.”

His smile fades almost as soon as it appears. Hopes wants it back; when he smiles his eyes aren’t quite so blank, and his face grows almost soft. Nothing like the guy in the tabloids. Nothing like the man in her dreams, either.

“One asshole in particular?” she asks.

There it is. A little smaller this time. Hope would pat her own back if she couldn’t _feel_ Jessica rolling her eyes.

“Two or three assholes,” Daredevil says. “And one idiot in a mask.”

The corners of his eyes crinkle when he smiles. It’s cute. Hope grins back, wondering if, somehow, he can feel it.

+

Once Jessica finishes her stitching and the blood is mostly mopped up, they shift him to the futon. The guy’s only a little taller than Jessica but, in Hope’s estimation, about a hundred pounds heavier. He doesn’t complain, though. Just keeps saying that he should go, like vaulting across rooftops is still an option.

“I need you gone by morning,” Jessica snaps, throwing him a sheet. “It’s not morning.”

“It’s five o’clock.”

How would he know? Hope gapes down at him.

“So I need you gone by daylight. You’ve got an hour--I’d use it.” Jessica slumps back toward her bedroom, beckoning Hope to follow. “And _you_ better not kick.”

They both end up sprawled out on top of the sheets, not quite able to get back to sleep, definitely not able to stay awake. Hope keeps smelling the blood on her hands, even though she’s scrubbed until, realistically, she should smell nothing but soap. She flops onto her side, curling her back away from Jessica. She listens to the soft rhythm of her breathing and tries to mirror it.

Finally, she drifts off. She doesn’t dream about blood, or Daredevil. In fact she doesn’t dream much of anything. Just patches—bits and pieces of things she’s seen, memories that won’t quite gel together. All she gets are clips, flickers.

Killgrave’s fingers trailing down her belly, long, pale, scuttling like spider’s legs.

Jessica’s arms circling around her.

The not-quite sting of the broken stem jabbing into her throat.

She’d meant to kill herself. She really had. It didn’t go far back enough, though. Only nicked an artery.

 _Two times lucky_ is what Mom used to say.

Hope surfaces just enough to hear Jessica’s breathing, and on the other side of the wall, deeper and heavier, raspy with pain, Daredevil’s.

Two times lucky.

Well. Maybe she is.


	3. we know that we're headstrong, and our heart's gone, and the timing's never right

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> New developments crop up in one of Jessica's investigations, and Hope does some investigating of her own.

He’s gone by the time they wake up. Hope almost assumes it was a dream— _So listen, I helped patch up Daredevil, and he’s this like, really scary blind guy_ —until she sees the dribbles of blood they missed on the window sill.  

Jessica cancels her early appointments and says they’re getting a breakfast “that’s not completely shitty”. Hope suggests Papaya King.

“Never been,” says Jessica, as if this is normal.

“Are you serious?” asks Hope, then, before Jessica can argue, “Come on—I’ll pay.”

The chain’s second food truck has just started parking in Hell’s Kitchen. Hope buys two dogs, two orders of curly fries, and an order of fried pickles.

“When I first came here,” she says, “Owen called me up and told me I had to come here. He’d been googling all these places, because he and I both love hot dogs. He said this place has the best hot dogs in New York. And Katz Deli has the best sandwiches.”

 “Never been there, either.”

“God!”

“They’re plenty of other places to buy pastrami.”

They sit at one of the rattling metal tables set up around the food truck. Hope spreads out their food, feeling like her Mom at the head of the table during Christmas dinner. She meant to take Owen here, when he visited. He’d have wanted to try the corn dogs, too. Hope can’t stand cornbread.

Jessica digs into the fried pickles while she starts on the fries, licking grease and Cajun seasoning off her fingers after every few bites. “Did you call Karen?”

“She asked me if I was hiring interns now.”

Hope can’t tell if Jessica thinks that’s funny or not. Her standard-issue, don’t-bullshit-a-bullshitter tone is firmly in place.

“Did you guys meet through him?”

Daredevil. Hope still feels a little loopy, a little spacey, unsure if it was all real but sure it wasn’t a dream. She crunches on another fry.

“Through work,” says Jessica, pushing the leftover pickle chips her way.

Okay. A PI and an investigative reporter (Obviously she did some preliminary Googling, and what do you know, Karen Page even looks a bit like Aunt Kathy—it’s all in her nose, the set of her eyes) could have plenty of chances to meet. Hope can buy that for now.

She bites into a pickle chip, wondering how to phrase her next question before deciding to just come out with it. They don’t have all the time in the world—Jessica’s got an appointment with Hogarth at 5:00.

“You sent him to watch me after I got out, didn’t you?”

Jessica shrugs. Hope bites into another pickle chip. The center’s scalding; how did Jessica pack away so many so fast? “I found the photos.”

“Yeah.” Jessica scans the sidewalk, eyeing a tall, dark-haired man who sweeps past him in a way that makes Hope’s stomach twist.

 _Is it him?_ she wants to ask, though she know it’s not, it’s _not_.

“I did.”

Hope shakes her cup, rattling loose the last of the fries. “You know you could have come to visit me instead,” she says. “After I got out. Or before.”

“You wouldn’t have wanted me there, Hope.”

“Guess what, though? I did.”

Jessica’s eyes slide away from her, slick and dark and sharp as ice. Hope feels the edge in her own voice and tries to bite it back down as she says, “You don’t get to decide what I want.”

“I know that.” Jessica flicks a bit of peeled-off batter coating at a pigeon. “But you don’t get to decide what I want, either.”

 _I needed you_ , Hope almost says. _I needed you and you left me._ She knows that’s not fair, as sure as she knows that what Jessica says is true. Hope wants so much from her—needs so much from her—and doesn’t have the right to any of it. In the past day alone Jessica’s already given her a job and a roof over head. Why can’t that be enough?

They finish their hot dogs in silence.

+

The walk back to Jessica’s place is almost silent, too. Halfway up the stairs, though, Hope stops.

“Oh my God.”

Two steps above her, Jessica’s shoulders stiffen. “What?”

“I flashed my tits at Daredevil.”

She’s never seen someone whip around so quick. “ _What?_ ”

“The day before yesterday. I had to go grab a few things from Mei’s, and I come out of there shitfaced drunk and—” Hope motions as if she’s yanking up her top again. “Oh my God. He didn’t actually see that I guess—how does he get around, anyway?”

Jessica shrugs. Aggressively. Hope gets the impression she’d love to know, too, but doesn’t want anyone else knowing that. “Sonar?”

“So can he sonar-detect boobs?”

“Yours?” Jessica glances down at Hope’s rack, then shrugs. “Maybe.”

+

They settle. Into a routine, into living together. It’s not quite as hard as Hope figured it would be. Not quite as bitter, either. They don’t talk about what happened at Niku. They don’t talk about her time in the psych ward. They don’t talk about Killgrave, period. It lies between them, thick and dark and deep enough to drown in, but all Jessica wants to do is ignore it. Skirt the sides, maybe dip a toe in. Nothing more.

It’s still there. Pretending that it isn’t won’t make it so, but that’s not Hope’s choice. She takes the antidepressants every morning and moves on with her life. Organizing files. Buying lunch or groceries. Hauling dirty clothes to the laundromat around the corner because the machine in Jessica’s building is busted beyond repair. (“Super won’t fix it. Malcolm used to, but he’s upstate with his mom.”)

It’s not interesting work. Not what Hope’s parents or high school guidance counselor would call fulfilling. It’s steady. Boring. It leaves her time to do a little investigating of her own.

Two weeks ago Daredevil spread his DNA all over Jessica’s floor. Since then Hope hasn’t been able to get his face out of her head. At first she chalked it up to the novelty of waking up to a superhero bleeding on you, but when she studied his face in her mind’s eye, she realized she’d seen it before.

Where?

A day of mulling it over, on the edge of a revelation because God, she just knows she’s seen that face _somewhere—_ and then she remembers Carmen. A nurse back in the ward. One of the nicest ones (though they were all nice and, truth be told, it was a huge relief to give your routine and choices up to someone else). They weren’t supposed to discuss news with the patients. Carmen still kept muttering about “that shit show”.

Hope types _frank castle trial_ into her phone’s browser.

There he is.

The photo she pulls up is from the Bulletin’s brand-spanking new website. It’s a shot of Frank Castle’s legal team on the first day of the trial. Matthew Murdock, Franklin Nelson, and Karen Page.  Frank Castle, too, and Hope guesses he’s scary enough but compared to Killgrave he seems downright merciful. What’s the worst he ever did? Hung a couple mobsters up on meat hooks? He let them keeps their minds. Let them stand by their choices. All things considered, Hope thinks that’s pretty fair.

She’s not here for Frank Castle, though. Hope taps her phone’s screen, zooming up on Matthew Murdock. Just to be sure. The round, rosy glasses hide his eyes, but the set of his face, the curve of his jaw…he’s either an identical twin, a clone, or the man himself. Frankly, any of those options are possible.

“Nelson and Murdock?” she asked Carmen once. “Didn’t they help put away that other guy—Fisk?”

That’s why she’d first seen his photos, splattered across front pages and websites. For once upstaging Daredevil.

“Cute,” she’d told Mei. “Blind, but cute.”

Carmen nodded. “Uh-huh. You’d think they’d know better than to defend this guy.”

Hope’s stomach twisted. “Everyone deserves a fair trial.”

Carmen didn’t say anything else after that. 

“Hey. Heads up.”

She saves the photo and crams the phone back into her pocket. “What?”

“Don’t look so guilty,” Jessica grumbles. “I don’t give a shit about what you do on your lunch break. But now I’ve got a job for you to do.”

“More filing? God, I can hardly wait.”

“I’m not paying you to be an asshole. You need to get some information for me.”

A burst of excitement fizzles through Hope’s gut. “Online or in person?”

“Guess.”

Taylor Simons’ case rose to the top of Jessica’s list two days ago, when he went from being distant and evasive on the phone to completely unreachable. His mother’s hysterical, sure he’s vanished clean off the face of the earth.

Hope doesn’t blame her. It’s unsurprisingly easy to vanish in New York City.

“The cops think he’s another runaway. His roommate knows something, but he’s not talking,” Jessica explains. “Normally I’d slap him around—break a bone or two—but he’s a kid. Seems decent. Kind of wimpy. I figured he’d respond better to you.”

The spark in Hope’s stomach flares up, then dies. “What if he recognizes me?” She still catches her own face tabloid covers every now and again.

Jessica looks her over. “We’ll put you in something a little slutty. Even if he does, he won’t care.”

“So I get to be the femme fatale?”

She’s been sitting on her ass for days and days, with not much to do besides Googling pictures of cute blind lawyers with just might vigilante it up on the side. This is a case she can actually help with. The cute blind lawyer isn’t going anywhere.

She must look like a puppy who hasn’t been walked in weeks, because Jessica smiles.

“Yeah, you get to be the femme fatale.”


	4. and I imagine the tears in your eyes the very first night I'll sleep without you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The investigation thickens, forcing Hope to reach out for help.

Hope shimmies into her tightest pair of jeans (thanks to hospital food and antidepressants she’s gained at least ten pounds) and a top Jessica stole from Trish years ago. Black, slinky, just this side of tasteful. Picture-perfect femme fatale.

They take the subway, splitting up within a block of Taylor’s apartment. Jessica jumps up to his fire escape. Hope ignores the elevator and walks up six flights of stairs.

Jessica’ll be only a few feet away, with only a window between them, if she needs her. Still. Hope hesitates for a second outside the door. Yanks her waistband back over her gut, tucks a stray bit of frizz behind one ear.

It doesn’t matter how good her boobs look. If he recognizes her, their cover’s blown to hell.

She knocks.

“Hi,” Hope twitters as soon as he roommate (Brandon. His name’s Brandon.) cracks the door. “Um, I’m looking for Taylor? Taylor Simon?” She smiles wider, deepening her dimples. “I’m Lindsey.”

“Oh. Uh, hi, Lindsey.”

He’s an engineering major, but Taylor devoted most of his time to extra-credit activities. A clueless one-night stand seemed like the best cover. Hope blinks up at Brandon. Brandon has one of those goggle-eyed faces, wide-open and soft, spattered with freckles and acne. Decent? Oh, yeah. He hasn’t been through enough to be anything else.

“Is he home?”

“No.” Brandon swings the door a little wider. Something flickers across his face, and Hope’s stomach plunges. “I haven’t seen him in a few days.”

“Really?” her voice wavers. Not from disappointment. He’s seen her before. He knows. “Did he go home for the weekend?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Look.” Hope forces herself to scoot closer. “We’re not together anymore. I need to pick up some stuff. They’ll be in his room, so can I just…”

He knows, he knows—

Or not. Brandon hesitates a split-second before backing up. “Yeah, sure. Down the hall and to the right.”

Hope spent four summers in high school working at a petting zoo. After stepping into Taylor’s bedroom she can say with absolute certainty that she’s seen cleaner pig sties. Her bones feel like they’re vibrating and her palms slip over her purse straps, clammy. Jessica’s been through here, but Hope takes a second look, anyway. Trash can, under the bed, between the sheets, in the closet. She finds two tiny envelopes, stamped with some kind of character, in his top dresser drawer and slips them into her purse.  

Brandon’s waiting in the kitchenette when she comes out. Hope pastes on a smile.

“Do you know when Taylor’s gonna be back?”

God, she feels like throwing up. Brandon’s still staring at her, bug-eyed. He must recognize her face, even if he can’t place it. Her voice, too. 

Brandon shakes his head. His ears stick out like teacup handles. They flush pink at the tips.

“I don’t think Taylor’s coming back at all,” he blurts. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. It’s not your fault.” Wait, is that right? How would a one-time hookup answer that? What did Jessica say she should say?

_Small talk. He shouldn’t think you care too much._

About Taylor, that is. Brandon sounds desperate. Desperate to spill his secrets, even. If there’s a pretty blonde willing to listen.

Femme fatale, remember? _You can do this._

“But why don’t you think he’ll come back?”

She watches his face for another flicker. Guilt, recognition, anything. But Brandon’s eyes are soft and completely guileless.

“Just a feeling,” he mumbles.

“Just a feeling? Why don’t you tell me about it?”

+

It takes work, but not much. Brandon’s all too ready to spill his guts in the lap of some sweet, sympathetic girl. Halfway through, Hope realizes that she’s stopped pretending to be that girl. Because he’s truly afraid. She hears it in the words he tries to swallow before giving up and blurting them out.

“The last time I saw him, he was with this guy…this, um, Asian-looking guy. I mean, I don’t want to sound racist or anything, but he looked Asian.”

The characters on the envelopes. Hope glances at her purse, abandoned on the counter.

“This was in Hell’s Kitchen. Some crappy little dive bar—I think it was called Josie’s? Maybe Rosie’s.” Brandon thinks back. “Nah. Definitely Josie’s.”

Hope slurps the coffee he offered quickly so she won’t make a face. “Okay, but that’s a lead, right? Did you tell the police?”

 _Remember—you’re just interested. Not concerned. Not_ too _concerned. Go lightly or you’ll spook him._

Brandon’s ears flush darker. “I can’t.”

Her last gulp of coffee cools in Hope’s stomach. “Why not?”

He shrugs. Grips the handle of his own mug. Very lightly, Hope reaches out and touches his arm.

“Brandon.”

“It doesn’t make sense. Probably all in my head.”

Maybe so. “It doesn’t matter. You can tell me.”

“I think…I’ve been feeling, since he left, like somebody’s following me.”

_Mystery solved._

“More than one person. I mean, the PI his mom hired, she just sunk her teeth in and she won’t let me go—”

_Or not._

“—feels like I’m jumping at shadows; I guess I probably am, but…whoever got Taylor…it feels like they’re after me now.”

And then—apparently Hope’s living in a comic book now, because the glass breaks the second that last word drops from Brandon’s mouth, right on the fucking dot—then the apartment window explodes inward, and Hope yells and Brandon yells; they flinch into each other as the glass showers down, and Jessica, Jessica’s yelling louder than either of them. Underneath the anger and shock there’s a thin hard line of pain. There’s also a man on top of her. A man in black, and as they grapple and roll across the apartment, hands at each other’s throats, it’s all Hope and Brandon can do to keep out of range of their fists.

She hears his cellphone clatter to the floor, him cursing as he scrambles for it, and Hope hears herself screeching, “Call 911!” as if Brandon has other plans. The man in black hauls Jessica up by the neck, then slams her down, into the coffee table again and again until it splinters. That’s when Jessica outright screams. Hope screams along with her. There’s no way she can force her way between them, no way this ends well. Brandon’s cell shrills; they both darted off the couch just in time. It’s the next thing to break under a Jessica’s weight.

_Do something you have to do something—_

“He’s trying to kill her! You need to hurry!”

Dry wall crumbles. She remembers that the four of them aren’t the only people in the building.

She won’t remember the next few minutes. Not well, anyway. What she can scrape together feels slow, syrupy.

They’re crouching behind the kitchenette counter. Hope straightens. She walks to the door and she opens it.

Lights around her flicker like sunlight through water.

People are already in the hall, shouting, asking, dialing. Hope pushes past them. She finds the fire alarm. Halfway down. She pulls it.

She walks back. They’re still fighting, silently now though she knows they aren’t really. Silent, that is. There’s a freestanding coat rack by the door. Dull black metal. The kind of thing your mom buys and you never use. It’s too light to do any real damage. All the same, it’s as close to a weapon as she’s going to get. Hope’s always been a runner, but she has a decent arm.

It takes a minute, creeping up behind him. Making sure that she won’t hurt Jessica, too, then deciding that she doesn’t have time for that. One blow can’t do much more damage than what’s already been done. Being done, and she needs to stop it. At least try.

Hope swings. She watches the metal prongs glance off the back of the man’s head. She watches him stumble, and Jessica rear up, stumbling herself; she’s falling back too, she realizes, the coat rack clattering from her hands, her arms shaking. Her breathing comes in quick, tight gasps.

The world explodes again, into more broken glass and more screeching—the fire alarm, her, Jessica, Brandon, and, finally, the man in black as he plummets out the broken window. Hope hears the shout cut short, a thump that brings her stomach choking up through her throat. Then nothing. Fire alarm, screams, and all, the apartment’s as quiet as it’s ever been in the last couple of minutes.

Back on her feet, Jessica shuffles forward a few steps, then lets herself collapse into the broken wreck of the couch. Her eyes zip over the corners of the room until they light on Brandon, smoldering.

“You little _shit_. You couldn’t find the time to tell me you had fucking ninjas after you?”

“I got a call,” Brandon stammers, “They said they’d kill me—“

“Fuck that call,” she snarls. “Fuck you.”

Hope steps between them. She’s shaking, maybe hyperventilating, and all she wants to do is get Jessica off the couch and onto a stretcher. But the EMTS, not to mention the police and the fire department, are on their way. Until then, they’ve still got business to clear up.

“Tell me now,” she says. “What else have you got to lose?”

+

Jessica’s back is a one mess of swelling, purpling bruises. No broken bones, which under the circumstances is better than any of them hoped for. She’s going in to Metro General anyway.

“I’m coming with you.”

“No you’re not.”

“Shut up, Jessica.”

“No. You’re not.”

The phone’s pressed into her hand before she can say no. “Call Matt. I’ve got him saved to my contacts.”

It strikes Hope like a mini punch to the gut, thought it shouldn’t. Of course Jessica would know.

“You tell him what Brandon told you.” Jessica talks fast, almost whispering. Techs swarm around the both of them, trying to push Hope away, trying to secure Jessica to the stretcher. From the look on her face, she’s dying to swat a couple out the window. “It’s his territory, anyway.”

Then she’s gone. Police officers come next; Hope has to remind herself to quit breathing like her air is running out. To hold her head high. This won’t be like last time. Now the law’s on her side. Isn’t it?

+

A conversation:

“Hello?”

“Hello, Matt, I’m—it’s Hope.”

“What is it? Where’s Jessica?”

“She’s—listen, I don’t have time. This case she’s been looking into, Taylor Simon, it looks like he got taken by, um, the Hand? You need to see if you can find him. Soon.”

“The Hand? That’s all she has to go on? They’re spread all across Hell’s Kitchen.”

“We think they’re holding him somewhere near the waterfront.”

“Well, that clears it up.”

“Sorry. We didn’t have ti—”

He hangs up.

+

“So,” says Brandon. He sounds pissed, but more with himself than with her. “You’re Hope Shlottman.”

“The one and only.” Her own voice wobbles when she wishes it would cut, softens when she needs it to be hard; on the inside Hope’s about ready to collapse in on herself. Too many pieces in motion. Too many people to track. Wherever Taylor is, he could be dead by now. Probably is. And Jessica—

Jessica is going to be okay. You don’t die from bruises.

 _You don’t die from bruises. You don’t die from_ —

“I thought you looked familiar. Guess that makes me a fucking dumbass, huh? Two times over.”

Again: he’s not as angry with her as he is with himself. And you know what? She’ll take that. He’s not bolting in the other direction. He’s not refusing to talk to her.

Hope jiggles the keys in her pocket. They’re both outside the police station, loitering after more or less getting kicked out. Being back in there almost made Hope’s throat close up, but now, away from the questions and the shitty greenish-fluorescent lights, the stares and the coughs and the suspicion, she can see that they were just trying to help. Just trying to get to the bottom of things.

They sent their own men down to the waterfront. They won’t make it before Daredevil, but Hope still wonders who’ll be bringing back Taylor, or his body.

“Defense or prosecution?”

It pops out into the filmy night air, surprising her as much as it surprises Brandon.

“Huh?”

Now she knows why Jessica smokes. She needs something else to do with her hands—anything else; the jingling keys are starting to get on her nerves. “The defense and the prosecution at my trial. Who did you believe?”

“Oh, uh, neither, I guess.”

Well. That’s a new one. “How’s that?”

Brandon swallows. Maybe it’s just occurred to him that he’s talking to a murderer. “It seemed like kind of a mess,” he says. “Like neither side believed what they were saying. I never felt like they told the whole story.”

But how could they? It’s the kind of comic-book-splash-page, Jedi-mind-trick bullshit no jury in their right minds could buy. Hell, Hope hardly buys it herself.

“It never seems,” says Brandon, “like they got around to explaining what made—what makes—you tick.”

Dim is quickly heading for dark. She needs to go. So does Brandon, but back to where? His splintered apartment, where he can remember his friend shooting up, disappearing into the darkness with people he shouldn’t, blubbering incoherent phone calls from some place shaking from the sounds of ships’ horns?

Hope jiggles her keys faster.

“I couldn’t tell you,” she says. “But if you need a place to stay…I mean, it is sort of our fault your apartment’s trashed.” When he doesn’t answer, she adds, “I swear I won’t shoot you if you say no. Or if you say yes.”

Finally Brandon turns to her. Who knows in this light; she still thinks she spots a faint grin flit across his face. “That’s no way to ask a guy out, Shlottman.”

It’s the first bit of actual spirit she’s coaxed out of him. Hope’s ridiculously pleased.

“I’m offering you one night in the hostel. One night.”

Not her best pitch by any stretch. It doesn’t matter. They leave together anyway.

+

“You can take the elevator if you want,” she tells him. Brandon follows her up the stairs instead, and even though she doesn’t like the feeling of anyone eyes on her back, least of all a guy’s, she likes that he doesn’t ask why she bypassed the elevator. It should be obvious to anyone who read up on the details of her case. Still. It’s nice.

“Huh. You weren’t joking about the hostel part.”

“Nope. You take the couch.”

There’s a pot of instant coffee sitting stone-cold on the counter, and a carton of leftover Thai carryout in the fridge. Neither of them’s hungry, though. Hope locks the door, double checks the locks on the windows. She thinks about calling Metro General, then decides it doesn’t matter—she’d never get a straight answer out of Jessica if she did.

Settling into bed doesn’t help her fall asleep. It just makes her lonelier, remembering Jessica shifting by her side and Daredevil—Matthew, _Matt_ —breathing just behind the wall. Sure, she can hear Brandon shifting around, the springs creaking and squealing under him. It’s its own kind of comforting, but it’s not the same. She misses Jessica.

Hope tries not to think of her back, bruised to a swollen purple patchwork. She remembers hugging her on that first awful day, her arms around Jessica, Jessica’s arms around her, and that somehow leads her to remembering Daredevil, suit and mask and blank glass eyes. Something else the tabloids said (something even the newspapers said) was that it seemed like he could hear anything, and everything. Break a window in a back alley and he’d be there. Scream in a diner parking lot and this…this demon would melt straight out of the darkness. Like he was in every corner, and on every rooftop, of the city. Waiting.

Waiting outside the window, because he can hear two people breathing behind it, and knows one of them isn’t Jessica.

Hope’s not sure how long she’s been trying to sleep. She tiptoes past Brandon, who as far as she can tell is completely conked out, a snoring lump under the sheet. Sliding the window open and clambering out onto the fire escape, it occurs to her that this might be another dream.

“Did you find Taylor?” A chilly wind whips past, snaking under her T-shirt and raising goose pimples on her stomach. “Is he…”

Daredevil’s voice sounds smoother, a little softer. There’s no reason to pretend anymore. “He’s alive. The cops took him in to Metro-General; he’s in bad shape but he’ll live.”

“So you saved him. You and Jessica saved him.”

His lip quirks. Just a touch. “I did what I could on short notice. Thanks to you.”

“Oh. Yeah. Well…” Hope stutters, raking her brain for a semi-intelligent response until she spots the blood dripping from the rim of his mask.

“You’re hurt.”

A shrug; _it happens_.

“If you don’t mind waiting out here a second…” her voice is softer than his, hesitant. “I’m not as good as Jessica, but I could try patching it up. Do my best.”

He takes a minute to pretend he’s considering it, and Hope appreciates that. Loves him for it, almost. Can he hear that, somehow, in her breath or her heartbeat?

God. She hopes not.

“Thanks for the offer,” he says. “But I’d better be going.”

Hope steps back. Actually, she’s relieved that he passed it up. What with one thing and another, standing this close to him, on the rickety fire escape, with her T-shirt flapping up over her stomach, is getting kind of overwhelming. She slides the window back up.

“You didn’t have to come all this way just to tell me. Thank you.”

When she turns back for his answer, he’s gone. When she closes the window, latches it shut, and heads back for Jessica’s bed, she sees that Brandon wasn’t as dead to the world as she thought.

He’s standing in the kitchen. A dirty mug from the sink in one hand, the pot of cold coffee in the other. His face is wiped clean, blank. He’s seen one too many things to go through the whole shocked and appalled routine again. Hope sees that, and the flush building up again at the tips of his ears, and warmth floods through her belly.

“They brought Taylor to Metro-General,” she tells him. “He’s going to be okay.”

The coffeepot rattles, just a little, when Brandon sets it back on the counter. His shoulders shake. He’s not crying. Quite.

“I should have gone after him.”

Hope takes the mug from his hands. “It’s not your fault,” she says, knowing how little that means, how little it helps.

“Feels like it is,” he says.

Impulsively, Hope steps even closer and wraps her arms around him. It’s not like hugging Jessica. Even Jessica hugged back, but Brandon’s stiff as a board, barely leaning into her at all. She’d stop, if he pushed her away. He doesn’t.

“We’ll see him tomorrow. First thing. Okay?”

His chin thunks against the top of her skull. Settles there.

“Okay,” Brandon breathes.

Hope pulls back. “Come on,” she says.

He follows her back to Jessica’s bed. This isn’t anything close to what Hope expected going in, but it’s not…it’s not unwelcome. She isn’t ready to spend the rest of the night alone. Neither is he.


	5. and when it happens I'll be miles away and a few months late

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Never, in a million years, will she be prepared for this.

Taylor Simons, like Daredevil promised, is alive. He’s also sporting two casts and the slack, serene face of the truly doped up. Hope gets a glimpse of it through the door as Brandon hurries in. She doesn’t stick around. She had a part in saving the guy’s life, sure, but she doesn’t know him.

(“I’m glad you weren’t his girlfriend,” Brandon said, after. “I mean, he’s my best friend but he’s also kind of a dick.”

A long pause.

“He still didn’t deserve that.”

“Who does?”)

Jessica, though? Jessica’s in fine form, bandaged and medicated and ready to get out. Hope’s so eager to get in to see her that she almost bowls over the pretty blonde already stationed by Jessica’s bed.

“Easy,” Jessica warns her, though she sounds almost relaxed. It must be the meds. “Say hello to Trish.”

Hope’s stomach drops. They’ve never met in person before—she has no clue about Trish Walker’s actual opinion of her. But the woman smiles, her face bright and open, as relieved as Hope’s. Either she’s willing to like Hope, or willing to pretend she does for Jessica’s sake.

“Hello, Trish.”

“Hello,” Trish echoes. She steps aside so Hope can come closer. When she does, Trish lays a hand on her shoulder.

“Thank you for what you did yesterday. You saved her.”

“Oh,” says Hope. Then, “Really?” She stayed up even later than she planned last night. Nothing makes sense anymore.

“Really.”

Jessica yawns. “Jesus, Hope. Enough with the bullshit false modesty.”

“Woah,” she shoots right back. “What have they got you on?”

Trish breaks it up by promising that she’ll take them both out to lunch—someplace good, with at least three stars—before hurrying out to nag the front desk for Jessica’s discharge papers. Halfway through the door she stops to look back at Hope.

“By the way, Jess has told me you’ve really taken to the job.”

Hope doesn’t look to Jessica. She doesn’t need to. “It has its moments.”

+

Four weeks down the road hunkering down in an alley or a car’s backseat for hours on end loses its luster in a major way.

 “Bad shit’s what pays the bills, I guess,” Hope mumbles at the counter of a twenty-four hour diner after they’ve got photos for their third infidelity case in as many weeks.

“Can it, buttercup,” Jessica mumbles back, dribbling ketchup over stone-cold fries. “We can’t always be saving the world.”

It’s in that diner’s bathroom, over a sink as yellow and crusty as old mustard, that Hope realizes her period’s late.

She and Brandon aren’t going out. They’ve met on a couple not-quite-dates: once he took her out to dinner as a thank you. Another time it was the movies. Since that night in Jessica’s bed, they’ve had sex three more times. Each of those times he wore a condom, but Jesus, one slip is all it takes.

Hope’s never been on the pill. Before Killgrave she never needed it, and after she didn’t expect to need it again.

One slip. Even Owen could’ve told her that. And you’d think it’d take only one abortion for that lesson to sink in.

Hope dries her hands, very carefully, walks back out to meet Jessica, and says she’ll pay for the cab home.

She doesn’t call Brandon.

She doesn’t talk to Jessica about it—not the next morning, or the next week. Using her lunch break as a cover, Hope picks up a pregnancy test from a corner drugstore two subway stops away and pees on the stick in a McDonald’s bathroom.

Jesus.

Fucking _idiot_.

+

She should get rid of it. It’s not like this is new to her. It’s not like Jessica wouldn’t understand. It’s not like _Hope_ wouldn’t understand. She’s not ready for a baby. Never will be. And anyway, what kid wants a mom with no degree, no real home or boyfriend or job, no family? She’s seen how that goes. Why raise a kid who’ll hate her, and with good reason?

Hope still stalls.

Brandon should know. She wonders if he’s the kind of guy with old-fashioned values who’d offer to marry her right then and there (not happening) or the supportive kind who’d offer to go to the clinic with her (also not happening) or if he’d tell her to get rid of it and fade out of her life without another word. None of these options is what she’d call ideal; ideal would be not getting knocked up in the first place. None of them, though, are the real reason why she won’t call him.

Brandon is not Killgrave. This baby isn’t Killgrave’s baby. Hope isn’t the girl she was then, almost a year ago; she isn’t any more qualified to raise a child. She feels differently, though. To this baby, maybe. To herself. If she’s being honest, she’s not sure that she wants to get rid of it. That scares her more than whatever Brandon, or anyone else, could say or do. She could be headed toward the biggest mistake of her life, and instead of changing lanes she’s pushing on the brakes.

+

Six weeks is when it’s supposed to develop a heartbeat. Hope should drop by the free clinic, but she doesn’t. Part of her wonders if the problem will take care of itself on its own. Another part wonders why that part has to be such an asshole.

_Because I’m crazy._

_Because I barely have any money._

_Because I don’t need this._

_Jessica doesn’t need this._

_Brandon doesn’t need this—_

“What’s eating at you?” Jessica asks her once, grudgingly and a little cautiously. But Hope can tell that she does care to know, deep down—for a few weeks there, they were both as close to stable as they’ve been yet. Hope took her meds, quit eyeballing random men on the street. She even started running again, for the first time since Killgrave wrecked her legs. Jessica stopped coming home so late and cut back to just one drink in the morning. Now Hope’s stopped. Stopped running or even going outside much, and she knows Jessica’s worried.

That only makes her feel worse.

 “Am I crazy?” she shoots back. “Did he make me crazy?”

Jessica reaches up to scrape her hair back into a ponytail. “Why do you ask?”

“Why do you think?” Hope snaps.

Jessica raises an eyebrow; _two can play that game_.  “Why now?” she clarifies. “You haven’t said anything about him in weeks.”

Hope hooks a finger into the waistband of her jeans. “Been having some weird dreams lately.” That’s not a lie. “I just sometimes wonder—this is stupid—if some part of him got in my brain, you know, permanently. Like, there’s this part of me that’s always waiting for him, always watching, always sort of wanting him to come back because he makes things simple, right? You can’t choose. And that was awful, but that a part of me…Jesus, I don’t know, I almost want it back. I don’t know.”

He’d tell her what to do about this baby, and it would seem so clear, like God’s honest truth and why wasn’t she smart enough to see it right in front of her all along? She knows she shouldn’t, wishes she didn’t, but some days Hope misses that certainty.

She wants someone to tell her what to do; Hope wants to know, down to her very center, that the choice she’ll make will be the right one.

But now Jessica’s looking at her, Jessica with her thin face washed out by too many late nights, too much fast food, too much booze. Her eyes hold something deeper than kindness. Something sharper, too.

Understanding.

“I’m not telling you it’ll go away, because—“

“Because it won’t,” Hope echoes her. She traces the skin just above her waistband with one finger. She’s not showing yet. That won’t start for a couple more weeks. Apparently.

“One day, though, you’re going to be okay,” Jessica tells her. “One day, you’ll get your shit together and you’ll move off my couch and you’ll be okay.”

“Not good?”

“Maybe not.”

“So okay’s the best I can hope for.”

“You’re not that special, buttercup.” Jessica flicks open her laptop cover. “Okay’s all I’m shooting for, too.”

+

She doesn’t get nauseous, in the mornings or in the evenings, so thank God for small mercies. She does dream about this baby more than she did about the first one. Who knows why. Hope’s always had these incredibly vivid stress dreams, from middle school on. The first time she was pregnant was ten times more stressful than this, awful as it is, but she only remembers one dream, and it happened a couple nights after the abortion. There was more to it, a complicated, continuing story that she sometimes suspects all her dreams are woven in to, but the bits she remembers all had to do with hospital hallways, empty wards, and a bag of bleeding meat in her arms that started to writhe and cry.

Her dreams now are a little less obviously disturbing. They begin back in Omaha, and she’s home on break—spring, Christmas, or summer; take your pick. Mom and Dad know about the baby. They’re not overjoyed. They trust her, though. They know she’ll make the right decision. They know—and suddenly she’s back in that same hospital, this time holding an actual baby, but they’re both naked and covered in blood, wailing, wailing.

_Mom! Dad!_

_Owen!_

_Jessica!_

No one hears. Hope knows, somehow, that there’s nobody left to hear. She cradles the baby, their cries growing weaker and weaker, until she hears the slow, slithering curl of his voice in her head.

Killgrave tells her to put the baby down, just leave it there. Or he tells her to drop it, or wring its neck, or worse. She never sees him, but for, maybe, a flicker at the corner of one eye, a shadow in a doorway, and he words wrap around her, coaxing, convincing, till she knows it’s the right choice, the only choice. Down to the center.

Right then, she always wakes up. After the first dream, Hope stared up at ceiling, panting, knowing for a split-second that one of the only things that matters to her anymore is protecting this baby that barely exists yet. She’d try to resist Killgrave this time.

Try.

_He’s dead. It doesn’t matter anymore. Dead._

He’d win, still. He always does.


	6. didn't know where I was running to

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hope finds help from an (not completely) unexpected source.

In the middle of all this, somehow, she finds herself on the sidewalk one day, loitering outside a shitty bar called Josie’s.

Hope’s twenty-first birthday passed by a week ago. Neither she nor Jessica realized until the day after—they’ve been fielding a slew of new cases—and by then Hope could beg off a trip to a bar or (more likely given both their moods) the liquor store by saying she was too tired.

“Suit yourself.” Jessica might or might not have cared enough to get suspicious. Either way, Hope’s tired of hiding things from her. Tired of the guilt, molten hot and simmering through her skin, that comes with it. She’s not ready to break the news yet, so she finds excuses to get out. Even more than usual. Sometimes she takes actual trips, to stores, the dry-cleaner’s, the bank when she can poke Aunt Kathy for more money. More often she wanders.

So. She stops outside this bar, Josie’s, because she remembers Brandon mentioning it—and she needs to call him, needs to tell him, she’ll do it tonight, she really will—when they step out, arms linked. A dark-haired man wearing sunglasses (it’s almost six) and a blonde woman.

Hope turns away. Too late, though, and that night, staring up at the ceiling yet again, she’ll realize that there was something intentional in that.

Matt Murdock hears her. Hears something else, too. She can tell from the set of his mouth when he turns to her. Puzzled but not surprised.

“Hope,” he says, softly.

The breath bursts out of her with a sound too close to a sob. “Hi, Matt,” she mumbles.

They’re already past pretending. Why start again now?

+

“This is Karen. I think you’ve talked before.”

When the other woman smiles Hope feels, briefly, like sinking down through a sidewalk grate. She’s even prettier in real life, with a presence that her photos couldn’t get across. “It’s nice to finally meet you in person, Hope.”

“You too.”

They all pause, waiting for someone to pick up the thread. Karen clears her throat. Hope scuffs the toe of her shoe along the sidewalk. Matt focuses on the noise they can’t hear, his face deliberately blank but the vibe radiating off him so intent that Hope takes a step back.

Karen clears her throat again. “I, um…I’d better be going.” She unhooks her arm from Matt’s, and, shouldering her purse, casts Hope a skeptical look. “Do you need a cab home?”

“No thanks.”

“I’ll walk her home,” Matt says.

Still skeptical, and a little guilty. “Hope? Is that okay with you?”

He talked right over her. On a better day she’d have the energy to get angry. Hope had her fill of men speaking for her a long time ago, not that they’ve ever cared. Here’s Karen, though, offering her a way out.

She doesn’t take it.

“I can walk myself back,” she says, “but it’s fine.”

“‘Fine’.” Karen repeats. “Well, that was a ringing endorsement of Matt’s company.” She sighs. “Could you tell Jessica I got a call from Foggy? They’ve got a case with her name on it at Hogarth’s.”

“Sure.”

“Thank you,” Karen says, sincerely. “But tell her to call Hogarth—I don’t have any details. Just passing along the gist.” She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, finally untangling herself from their group. “See you later, Matt. You too, Hope.”

She’s not Aunt Kathy. Obviously she isn’t, but in that moment it hits Hope, full-force, that she doesn’t know this woman, not really, not at all, and she might one day but now? Now it feels like her entire past is stepping onto the curb. Hailing a cab and peeling away.

“Are you hungry?” Matt asks, a minute after Karen’s left. A long minute.

Hope combs a strand of hair back over her ear, then realizes she’s mimicking Karen and stops. “A little,” she admits.

“There’s a diner around the corner. According to Foggy—” his voices catches on the name. Just a little. “—they’ve got the best hash in New York.”

“I’ll pay,” says Hope.

Matt shakes his head. “That’s not necessary.”

“What? You’re not going to let me drop ten bucks for two plates of hash?” She stuffs her fists, curled as tight as her stomach with nervousness (shame, too, because goddamit, she’s not some lost little girl anymore—or if she is, why does it have to be so goddamn fucking obvious?), into her sweatshirt pockets. “You’re already going through enough trouble for me.” She starts walking. “Come on. I’ll let you leave the tip.”

Hope’s never walked with, or even close, to a blind person before. She wonders if he expects her to link arms with him like Karen did, but Matt just matches her pace, his cane tapping a rhythm on the sidewalk. The silence between them feels comfortable, or at least not agonizingly tense, so Hope keeps quiet until they’re seated in a plush red booth with dingy ceramic mugs of pitch black coffee in front of them.

She shifts on the cracked seat. “You heard its heartbeat, didn’t you.”

She’s not asking.

Matt smiles at the waitress hurrying back with a Braille menu. “Have you told Jessica?”

Hope shakes her head.

Matt waits.

“Sorry—no.”

Her stomach winds even tighter, the nervousness morphing into shame. “I’m not trying to trick her or anything,” she protests. “I’m not going to ask her for anything else. It’s…I haven’t told anyone yet. I didn’t think I was going to keep it. I still don’t. But—”

“Hope,” he says again.

“I’ll move out if she wants me to.”

“Hope.”

She stops.

“I shouldn’t be the one to tell you this.” Matt hasn’t opened his menu. “I hardly know either of you. But I can tell she cares about you.”

“I care about _her_ ,” says Hope. “But I’ve been mooching off her for months. Using her. And here comes this…it just takes the fucking cake.” She stirs her coffee too fast until it slops into the saucer. “Sorry. I really shouldn’t be telling you all this crap.”

Matt’s skeptical tone is not lost on her. “If you’re using her, I don’t think she minds.”

“I mind.”

They both order hash when the waitress comes back. Hope picks at her cuffs. She hasn’t showered in…a few days. Let’s say. She scrapes the hair back from her face; her nails come back smudged and oily. She glances at Matt. If he senses her staring he doesn’t let on.

“Can you smell me?”

The second after she blurts that out Hope’s face sizzles. But the waitress has been giving her these looks, concerned like Karen’s. Not as sweet. She looks bad. She knows that. She doesn’t care, not really, but if it’s bothering him…

“Not much,” Matt says. Somehow he keeps his face straight.

“Sorry,” she sick of that word, and sick of having to say it. “With your super senses and all, I thought maybe…”

“Believe me, you’re not the worst of what I’m smelling. Not by a long shot.”

Hope traces a finger along the table’s edge. Not exactly a compliment, but she’ll take it. “What’s the worst thing you can smell?”

“Right now? Probably that the line cook hasn’t washed his hands in two days.”

“Two days…shit.” Hope’s appetite, which wasn’t roaring to begin with, fades to a whimper. “Maybe don’t tell me _that_.”

“You asked,” Matt says mildly.

What’s it like for him, to live in a city like New York, so loud and heavy and pulsing, so dirty? Some days even Hope can smell—almost feel—its stink working into her pores. Most days Jessica complains about the neighbors up the hall, down, the hall, overhead, everywhere. But neither of them…what’s it like to smell the line cook in the kitchen, the waitress two tables away, the polluted rain drizzling down to coat the streets? To hear the squeak of someone’s shoes, the rasp of fingernails across the tabletop, the heartbeat of her baby?

The baby.

Her baby.

“Do you want me to wash my hands?” she asks. “Or my hair? Because I can do it. I’ve washed my hair in a public bathroom sink before.”

Then Matt laughs. Chuckles, she guesses, is probably the better word; they’re in a public space and they’re trying to be quiet, because they’re talking about his super senses and her unplanned pregnancy and an unhygienic line cook, but it lights his whole face up, cracks it into the grin she remembers from the night she held his head between her hands.

“Did you really?”

He needs to forget himself, maybe, to smile like that.

Hope leans forward. “Back in Omaha,” she tells him. “My parents were driving me home from a track meet. My Dad, he bought this crappy secondhand van that smelled like the dumpster behind Wal Mart—that’s another story—and my brother Owen decided he couldn’t take it anymore, but instead of leaning to the side or whatever, this idiot unbuckles and stands up, so when he stands up he pukes yellow Gatorade all over my hair…”

+

Talking to Matt with his mask off is easy. Even friendly, though it’s only their first real conversation. He waits until they’re both spooning up the last of their hash to pull out the big guns again.

“Hope?”

“Hmm?” He keeps using her name, tugging on it every so often like a life line, like he knows that the last man she ate dinner with hardly bothered to call her anything at all.

“Do you want the baby?”

The hash _is_ good, crusty and crisp with bacon fat. Hope swallows.

“I know of some…services. Catholic, if that’s a problem for you, but—”

“Well,” she says dryly, “I’m Anglican.”

“You can’t always make it on your own,” says Matt, and there’s something raw in his voice that tells Hope he’s still learning this, or has yet to really learn it at all. “And that’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

“That’s not what you believe.”

“I don’t follow my own advice. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t.”

There’s a little of that edge creeping back into his voice, a little of the sharpness and implacability she associates with Daredevil, Vigilante, and not Matt Murdock, Lawyer. Which is stupid. They’re one in the same. He wishes it were that simple, she bets. The same way she wishes she could split herself in two. Hope before and Hope after. Hope now and Hope then.

She scrapes the last bits of browned-up potato crust into her spoon. “I don’t know if I can take care of it. I don’t know if I want to. I had an abortion,” she sticks that in for no good reason, except that he’s Catholic, apparently, and a good Catholic boy would tell her exactly how selfish she was being, and how sinful. Could be that’s what she wants. “I could get another. I probably should. But I keep stopping myself.”

 _Why?_ she expects him to ask. But Matt doesn’t ask, or answer. He listens.

“That first one…I couldn’t ever have loved it.” Selfish or not, that’s the truth. Hope sees her reflection in the dark rounds of his glasses, smudged, a little blurry. Uncertain. She sets her spoon down, tucks stray hair behind both ears, self-conscious all over again. “But with this one…I’m not sure. Maybe I could.”

It hits her then, for the first time, pressed against the window, her thighs half-pasted to the cracked leather of the booth. She could love her baby this time. And, at the same time, she realizes that she never thought she’d be able to. She never expected to love anyone after Killgrave.

But.

She has Jessica, doesn’t she? She has Trish, who took them out for the fanciest lunch Hope’s ever had and sat by her side to explain the menu. She has Brandon, who’ll never be much of a heartbreaker but who sometimes looks at her with his face so open and sweet that it makes her ache.

(“Why did you come home with me?” she asked him, more than once. “You know what I did.”

“Back there in the apartment,” he answered, “you saved us both. I guess I didn’t think you’d be killing someone you just saved.”)

And now she has Matt. Matt, who, thanks to Jessica, she had before she even knew she had him.

“How does it sound to you?” Hope asks, as uncertain as her reflection. Wobbly, hesitant. “Healthy?”

“Well,” says Matt, “I’m no doctor.” He cocks his head, anyway, tuning in again, and Hope watches the set of his jaw soften. “It’s going strong.”

The relief that washes over her, from the crown of her head to the tips of her toes, is ridiculous. But she suspects that’s because it’s mixed with a good bit of fear. And doubt, still.

“Good. It’ll have to be strong.”

“You need to make an appointment,” Matt says, his face hardening a little, his voice firm. “Like I said, I’m not a doctor.”

Hope curls a hand in her lap, against her stomach. “I will.” It’s a promise—a choice to do something about this, one way or another, and falls out of her so heavy.

“Soon.”

“Yeah. I get it.” She signals to the waitress for her bill. Finally she has a course set; even though it gives her some agency it doesn’t make Hope feel any better. All she wants to do is get out of here, out of range—if that’s possible—of Matt’s hearing. Out from under his eyes that see everything and nothing at once. She wants to go home.

If it’ll even be a home once she tells Jessica. Still. She needs to.

It can’t be helped any longer.

When their waitress sets down the bill both Matt and Hope reach into their pockets—Matt for his wallet, Hope for the crumpled twenty she jammed in there before going out.

“Just the tip,” she warns him (and somewhere else, with someone else, she’d be laughing, but now she just blushes, praying he can’t sense blood flow because _good grief_ , Hope). She glances down to read the bill. “Fifteen dollars. She was pretty good. Refilled our coffee and everything. So, say, fifteen percent of that?”

“I’m not sure,” Matt says, so seriously that for a second she believes him. “My last refill was a little cool.”

“Just a little? _Matt_. Have a heart.”

He’s loosening her up. Trying to distract her from the panic that he must hear rising in her own heartbeat, in the way she chews at her dried lips. It’s a nice thing to do. An almost tender thing. Later, when she’s not panicking, Hope will remember it, and gather it up in her mind and hold it close.

In the meantime, they walk home together. Jessica’s apartment is out of the way for Matt. Out of the way by quite a bit, but he insists he doesn’t mind. The drizzle started and stopped while they were still inside; the air’s just as muggy but now a thin damp film coats the sidewalks. They walk silently for the first few blocks, giving themselves both a chance to breathe a little.

“I meant what I said,” he says eventually. “About needing help. Take it from someone who’s screwed their own life to hell and back…just ask.”

The way his voice snagged over the name Foggy. The way he and Karen held themselves, apart even with their arms hooked together. They’d been closer. Once.

 _He’s lonely_ , Hope thinks. For all he’s done to help her, she never thought she might be able to help him, even a little.

She stops, reaches for his free hand. Hope laces her fingers through Matt’s.

“Thank you.” A second, a quick squeeze, and she pulls away, her face burning. Again. “Jesus. We need to start meeting when you’re not bleeding and I’m not pregnant. Or drunk.”

“Drunk?”

“I know Jessica had you follow me after I got out of the hospital. I saw you on a rooftop when I was crocked off my mind on butterscotch schnapps—“

 _I love you. I love you_ this _much._

“Anyway.” Hope tugs her sweatshirt down over her waistband. “I never thanked you for that.”

“You don’t have to.” Matt looks straight ahead. He’d be avoiding her gaze if he weren’t blind already. “I never thanked you for that night at Jessica’s either.”

“What, for kicking you when you were already down?”

His lips twitch. “It happens. Risk of the job.”

They’ve almost reached Jessica’s. Hope grapples for one last thing to tell him. Something deeper than a thank you, that means everything she’s tried to get across, but she comes up empty.

“I guess you’re right,” she finally says. “If I started thanking everyone who helped me after…I’d probably never stop.”


	7. but I won't look back

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The fear--and all that comes with it--never really leaves.

She has an offer of help, Matt’s phone number, and the warmth still lingering on her palm from when he squeezed it back. That held off the fear for a while.

It can’t stop it.

She's let herself into the apartment—Jessica’s out, thank God—panting from all those stairs, when she thinks, _How am I going to explain that?_

What reason can she give her very much not hypothetical kid for Mommy not being able to ride in elevators?

She stinks. She needs to get clean. Hope locks the door behind her, starts stripping even before she gets to the dingy, never-cleaned bathtub. The water pisses out, too hot; there’s something scuttling around the drain that Hope squashes with her foot as she climbs in.

_Shoot them in the head._

Soap slicks her up. Fingers ripping through her hair but the knots are worked in too deep.

_Leave it there._

_Kill it._

_It doesn’t want you._

_Doesn’t need you._

_Why should it?_

_Leave it there._

_Kill it._

_Kill it._

She thought he was gone. _Please_. Like a few flashback-free fucks was all it would take? The water pours over Hope, almost sizzling.

He’ll never leave her.

He’ll never _leave_.

Sex was what got her into this mess, made her responsible for something she has no business being responsible for. Something she wants to keep, something she shouldn’t keep—loving it won’t change the fact that she’ll hurt it. Hurt it over and over again. She won’t be able to stop herself. Hope sticks two fingers inside herself, and, using the fingers of her other hand to rub at her clit, too hard and too fast, works them in and out, in and out. This is what she wanted, right? _This what_ you _wanted, look what it got you; what’re you going to do now, huh? Huh?_

Afterward, she pulls her fingers out. Rinses them in the cooling water before shutting it off. She lowers herself, dripping, to sit in the tub.

“I’m going to hurt you,” she tells it, arms curled over her stomach. “Don’t you get it? I’m going to _hurt_ you.”

One conversation in a cheap diner won’t change that.

+

“Shit.”

The bug she squashed—it’s a cockroach, Hope thinks—didn’t wash down the drain. The sticky, crunchy smear sits less than an inch from her toe.

“Okay. Come on. We gotta get you up.”

Fingers curl under her arms, pulling. Her feet slip under her.

“You’re not going to fall. Come on.”

An arm around her shoulders, another around her waist. Up, over the edge, and out.

“Did you hear me? Don’t fucking fall, H—Jesus!”

She didn’t plan on it. Her legs just…crumple, knees squishing into the bath mat like wet paper, bloated, boneless. But Jessica’s arms are still around her; Jessica’s arms are so pale, like snow against her skin, and Hope’s no bronzed beauty herself…

“Jesus, you’re freezing.”

Jessica’s crouching, her body curled around Hope’s, her arms uncurling to chafe over Hope’s shoulders. She’s dry. She’s warm. Hope never thought her hands would feel so warm. She could lean into them. Instead she bends away, hair hiding her face, dribbling rat tails.

“How long were you in there?” Her hands might be warm, but Jessica’s voice is sharp, scraping up and down like the edge of a knife. “You’ve got to move, Hope.”

Like this, always like this. Their conversations turning into battles. Something trembles in her gut.

“I’m not doing it for you. Move your ass.”

It’s working its way up and she clamps her hand over mouth, seams her lips and clenches her teeth tight, not here, not now; if it finds its way out now she’ll be completely undone.

“What, you can’t feel it?” Jessica stops rubbing. Instead she grabs a handful of Hope’s arm, pinching. Digging her nails in. “Are we really going to do this? Really? You’re shivering, Hope. Get up.”

Her breaths come fast. Juddering.

“You want a towel? Towel’s right over there.”

Mom loved her and Dad loved her and she loved them, with all her heart, and she still shot them, shot them right through the head. She’d have shot herself if she had the guts—how can you have the guts to kill your parents but not yourself? How could she tell that to a kid, how could a kid trust her after that, love her? She can’t trust herself.

Jessica’s not bent over her anymore. Jessica’s standing, telling her to move, like it’s nothing, like she should be past this, like it’ll ever be over—

And she’s breathing harder and her stomach is working its way up her throat and her eyes are blurring and—

“ _Get_ _up_.”

And there’s this awful, meaty, wrenching in her gut, and just like that Hope’s teeth unclench and her jaw works loose and she begins to cry.

Really cry. This isn’t all the times she felt like it, this isn’t all the screaming she did in prison, this isn’t her squatting on the toilet, muffling her noise with a wad of toilet paper. Hope sobs. She dribbles down snot and spit. Her shoulders shake. Her stomach works like a bellows. Her throat aches.

Jessica crouches down.

Jessica fits her arms back around her.

“You’re going to be okay.”

She’s not. She’s _not_. Hope’s sob thins into something like a scream as she thrashes away, flailing one arm out to sock the other woman in the shoulder.

Jessica pulls her back in. “So don’t listen to my shit if you can’t take it. Hit me. I can take that. I can take anything you throw at me, buttercup.” Her hair brushes down, tickling Hope’s shoulders. “You can take it too. Hit me.”

Hope hits her. She sobs and screams and punches, again and again. Jessica is solid. Jessica is a wall, unmoving. Jessica holds her through it all, and when Hope’s spent (of punches, not tears) she wraps her arms around her even tighter.

She rests her chin on Hope’s still-damp head. “It feels like shit. It’ll always feel like shit and you’ll fight for just a few days when it doesn’t. When you forget how much it hurts. You never will for long. But you’re going to live with that. You’re going to live, you’re going to think you’ll never get better, but you will. You will. You’re going to be okay. You’re going to be okay.”

“I killed them.”

“I know. I was there, Hope. I was there.”

She’s rocking. Ever so slightly, back and forth, but Jessica—Jessica Jones, world-weary PI who couldn’t give two shits about anything—is rocking, so by default, caught in her arms, Hope’s rocking, too.

“I hurt people. I hurt you.” _I’d still have a family if you’d killed him the first time_ _._ “I can’t stop.”

She feels Jessica’s voice as it vibrates up through her throat. “Nobody can stop that. We’re all fucked up.”

Somehow, in the middle of all this, Hope started holding on to Jessica as tightly as Jessica’s holding on to her.

“We’re all fucked up. We’re never going to stop doing shitty things to each other. We just have to deal with it. You have to deal with it.”

It surprises her a lot less than it should, given the circumstances. Jessica’s voice catches on the next words. “I swear to God, if you don’t deal with it, I’ll throw you through a wall. Because I’m not leaving, Hope. I’m not leaving and I’m not letting you stew in your own shit.”

Jessica’s right. She’s shivering.

They’re locked together, each one holding the other up. She didn’t notice that until now. Didn’t think Jessica could need her the way she needed Jessica.

Well, that’s on her. Jessica hides things. Hope should know that by now.

She works one arm free. Braces it on Jessica’s shoulder to steady herself as she gets up. Hope stumbles. Her skin’s almost dried but her hair still strings cold trickles down her back. Her body feels blotchy, waterlogged, loose in a way she remembers from when she used to throw huge crying fits as a kid. She makes it to the towel rack, and back.

Jessica hasn’t gotten up. She shifts a little when Hope slides down next to her, back propped against the bathtub.

She’s still cold. The towel helps.

“I never thought it was your fault,” says Hope. “Never.”

The corner of the towel slips off her shoulder. Jessica huffs out one of her signature pissed sighs and pulls it back up. “Put some clothes on. You’ll get sick.” She lets her hand rest on Hope’s shoulder for a minute longer than it needs to. “Tell you what. I’ll visit the next time they check you into a psych ward.”

The laugh erupts out of Hope like a wet sneeze. “You’ll bring me chocolates? And one of those huge teddy bears?”

“I’ll sneak you booze.”

“It’s a deal.” Hope feels her own smile, small and wobbly. She traces patterns over the splattered tiles with one finger.

“You were right,” Jessica says, very abruptly and very quietly. “I should have come around the first time.”

She doesn’t say anything else. It doesn’t matter. Hope knows that it might have hurt them both too much. Her seeing Jessica holding up, Jessica seeing her very much not holding up. Even though she sees now that Jessica was, in her own closed-off way, falling apart as quickly as she was. That, even months later, they’re still falling apart.

Hope reaches across the distance that’s never been smaller. Never been wider, either. She reaches out, and Jessica’s fingers lace through hers.

+

Mom! Dad!

Owen!

Jessica!

_The baby’s crying. Screaming. There’s no way she can possibly stop it. Not now. His voice is in her head. There’s no way she can possibly shut it out, either._

Put it down.

Leave it.

Snap its neck.

_This time, Hope looks up. She searches for his shadow in the doorways. Doesn’t find it. She sees—at the end of the hallway she sees a man in red, blank-glass eyes, burning. Matt, she thinks, quick and grateful and stupid. It’s not him. Not quite._

_Daredevil._

_“Where’s Jessica?” She’s not sure her voice carries all the way down there. It strains and cracks. Unlike Killgrave’s, which swells inside her skull, as strong as ever. “I need to find her!”_

I need her.

_She’s at the end of the hall. She’s right in front of him, and Hope feels his hand cupping the base of her skull, gently now; she looks up into his eyes, blank and burning all at once, like another story, another dream she can’t quite remember—_

_“Hope,” he says. “It’s okay. You’ve got her.”_

_“What?”_

_“You’ve got her.”_

_She glances down, at the baby squeezed in her arms that’s still screaming, long and bone-pale, almost alien-looking, with a thatch of black hair._

_“Jessica?”_

_The baby doesn’t answer. Of course. It just screams louder._

_Killgrave’s voice picks up; he’s practically chattering now. The same threats, the same orders, fast and pleased and greedy. Hope feels them, and believes them, as strong as ever. But here’s the thing. She’s heard it all before. Felt it all before. She knows how this ends. The same story, over and over, and she’s so tired of it. So goddamn tired._

_The baby sniffles._

_He’s screaming at Hope to drop her, leave her, forget all about her, and it’s hurting her not too, hurting so badly, but not as badly as it would, after, if she obeyed. Hope looks again, down at the pale, writhing, wailing thing in her arms. She holds it close._

_“You’re going to be okay. Oh, baby. You’re going to be okay.”_

She wakes up. Quick as that.

Hope flops over onto her back, breathing hard. She feels Jessica shift next to her.

“You okay?”

They haven’t shared a bed since Matt crashed on the futon. Hope’ll never admit that she missed it, but it’s nice, now, to wake up with someone next to her. Better than nice.

She blinks the floaters out of her eyes, the last pieces of fuzzy heaviness from her brain. “I’m fine. I just…I have to tell you something.”

“Jesus, Hope,” Jessica groans. Then, “Whatever. Shoot.”

Hope curls her fingers into fists around the covers. “I’m pregnant.” There’s no answer right away, only heavy silence in the dark. She rushes on. “I don’t want to get rid of it. I don’t know if I want to keep it, either, but…I want to have it. At least.”

More silence.

“Jessica.”

The mattress squeaks as the other woman rolls toward her. Jessica props herself up on one elbow. This close, even in the dark, Hope can see that she’s not thrilled. Not frothing at the mouth, either. That’s a good sign, right?

“I’m sorry,” says Hope. “I didn’t mean to set you up like this, I swear.”

“Don’t say that.” Jessica’s voice is hard. Tough and brisk. “We’ll figure this out. Or you’ll figure this out. I don’t give a shit either way.”

_Sure._

“Just let me get back to sleep. Bug me about it in the morning.”

She doesn’t turn away. Jessica flops back down, and very deliberately closes her eyes, but she doesn’t turn away from Hope. Hope doesn’t turn away from her.

Slowly, her fingers unknot and relax. She smooths the cover down over them both. Tomorrow she’ll pick up that refill on her prescription and call Brandon and--

_You’re going to be okay._

One day she’ll know what to do with this baby.

One day she’ll move out of Jessica’s place, into an apartment of her own.

One day she’ll call Matt up. Ask him out to dinner, maybe.

One day she won’t need Aunt Kathy’s money anymore. One day she’ll be ready to see her little brother and explain, if he wants her to.

One day she’ll be able to take it if he doesn’t.

She’ll be okay.

They’ll all be okay.

+

So. This is how it starts.

**Author's Note:**

> Title and chapter titles from "Roman Holiday" by Halsey; this song was a MASSIVE inspiration for both the mood and plot of this fic. Again, thanks to the Defenders Big Bang for the deadlines and [angelfirevt](https://angelfirevt.tumblr.com/) for their art!
> 
> Come find me on [ tumblr](https://mapleymood.tumblr.com/) and [ dreamwidth](https://maplemood.dreamwidth.org//)!


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